At a Confab in Phoenix, Lamenting (and Inventing) the Future of News

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better filtration tools to help combat information overload. Yet at the same time, other conference participants were focusing on ways to use the Web to provide readers with even more information—for example, the context, history, and background relevant to major news stories. Tristan Harris, for example, talked about Apture, his San Francisco startup, which makes software that turns every word in a news story into a potential search query linking to Web pages, images, and videos. Now that the congenitally curious have so many more ways to explore whatever interests them, the only way to keep the slightly-less-curious from falling catastrophically behind is to lower the barriers to exploration even farther, Harris argued.

I’m not sure how to fix information overload. My own feeling is that journalism is all about “more”—otherwise we wouldn’t get up every morning to write yet more copy. But online journalists probably do need to work harder to provide useful and succinct context, beyond the “topic pages” that amount to a discouragingly huge wall of links to our own previous articles.

Finding readers is about search engine optimization. Get used to it. Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Land, led a heavily attended session on journalism and search. (Other journalists love Danny because he’s a really nice guy and a world expert on the search industry, and he doesn’t charge for his advice.) These days it’s easy for writers—and their bosses–to gauge the impact of each article just by looking at the traffic statistics. So it’s dumb to leave potential page views on the table by failing to do a few simple things to help your articles show up higher on search result pages, Sullivan argued. One is avoiding puns and allusions in headlines. While these may add spice to the writing process, they just make articles harder to find for readers. Another is checking Google Trends or the keyword search tool at Google Adwords to see what popular words or phrases come up in relation to your topic, then putting those words into your headline or lede paragraph.

Obviously, it’s possible to overdo this, and companies like Demand Media have created vast assembly lines to churn out articles that exist solely to pander to the search engines (as former Demand Media executive Sam Jones admitted at News Foo). But organic (i.e. non-sponsored) search results are such a huge source of traffic for most news sites, Xconomy included, that SEO should be seen as a natural part of the business—no different from the old process at print newspapers of rewriting headlines until all the type fit within the available space. If that makes us all less “creative,” so be it.

The Internet erases geography; paradoxically, it may save local news. I was impressed by the number of people on hand at News Foo from online operations that are all about serving audiences at a “hyperlocal” level. Xconomy is one of these—we focus on high-tech entrepreneurship within specific innovation clusters like Boston and the Bay Area, on the theory that this is where the really interesting and instructive interactions happen. Other examples included Windy Citizen (Chicago), TBD.com (Washington, DC), Technically Philly (Philadelphia), Everyblock (localized news feeds for 16 cities), Intersect (place-based storytelling), LocalWiki (expanding from Davis, CA, to many more places) and Spot.us (“community-powered reporting” in a variety of locations).

What’s happening here, in part, is that the Web lowers communication costs, making it possible for journalists to talk to smaller groups of people than … Next Page »

Do thinking people actually still go to Phoenix for any sort of conference? I wouldn’t be caught dead there while Jan Brewer is running her little death panels and persecuting Hispanics. Shame!

http://www.dailygrommet.com Jules Pieri

OK Wade…I *sort of* read every word of this piece. Some paragraphs were skimmed (hyperlocal discussion). That’s my usual behavior with your work…I do get to the end but lose attention here and there. Blame it on Twitter. Now if you start turning every word into a link my readership is tanked.

Bill Garber

Another fine report on Newsfoo – Thanks Wade, and @Stevebuttry for the link to your fine blog here.

I am interested in your approach to local, place namely. I agree. Silicon Valley is the Bay Area all right. It a kind of physical place that works for industry journalism.

Place is what a lot of ‘hyperlocal’ aspirants are looking for, too, if they has this sense of place. It is hard to do local anything when people say they live in Chicago, LA, or Atlanta, when they really sleep in a neighborhood with its own name in most cases.

Community journalism where I earn my living is happily dealing with people who sleep in the town they claim to be from by name.

I’m just now reading ‘No sense of Place’ by Joshua Meyrowitz (1985) (printed just for me 08 December 2010! Ah, the magic of on-demand book publishing by old-school Oxford in this case.) The subtitle is ‘The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior’ Meyrowitz makes a solid case for media of 25 years ago already having largely disguised, even disassociated places from people, whether place in the social order or place on the surface of the globe.

To the degree that technology can help restore both senses of place for people, the experience will be so compelling there may well be an embarrassment of riches–which is what gave rise to the golden age of journalism, was it not?

The masses are waiting, hanging out in Facebook, skimming Google returns, or just feeding that little uneasiness in their stomach at a drive through, the persistent little uneasiness they feel when nothing feels like it is standing still and when nothing feels like their place.